“Bottom-up” Poverty and Welfare Policy Discourse: Ethnography to the Rescue?
Author(s)
Curtis, Karen A.
Abstract
Policy related urban poverty research has been dominated by economics, political science, sociology, and geography and is based on their theoretical and classificatory schemes. Consequently, welfare policy research has concentrated on disembodied information about individual behavior as the primary way to isolate the causes of poverty and develop solutions, ignoring the effects of basic economic transformations and cyclical processes on the work experiences and prospects of the poor. This paper shows how critical/reflexive ethnography, particularly that produced by anthropologists, informs a “bottom-up” poverty and welfare discourse. Researchers outside anthropology tend to equate ethnography with concepts such as case study, thick description, in-depth interviewing and naturalistic approaches. In contrast, anthropologists see participant observation as the foundation of ethnographic research and are careful to describe individuals, follow situations, and trace events, evoking in their full context the people and events from which their interpretations are derived. This research promotes a reexamination of the role of the ethnographer and his/her differentiation from those studied under changing conditions within anthropology and the global economy. However, anthropologists have been reluctant to enter national policy debates on poverty and welfare, which may be why researchers from other disciplines overlook our work.
